Over the past thirty years, telephony has significantly evolved from the once-ubiquitous public switched telephone network service. Advances in technology have added an ever increasing array of features and capabilities to telecommunication devices, such as touch screens, video and still cameras, web browsing capabilities, email sending and receiving capabilities, music and video download, storing and playback capabilities, calendar and contact managing capabilities, global positioning system (GPS) location and navigation capabilities, game playing capabilities, and television capabilities, to name a few. Many of these features and capabilities are provided through specialized applications resident on the telecommunication devices. For example, many telecommunication devices allow the user to further customize the telecommunication device through custom configuration options or by adding third-party software. Such software is available for many different functions, not limited to communications.
In addition, traditional components have been utilized to provide new capabilities. The microphones of telecommunication devices, for example, are now used for capturing a user's audio input outside the context of a phone call between the user and another person or system. Applications, such as those mentioned above, accept and process audio input provided through a telecommunication device microphone. Such applications may utilize audio input to create recorded audio notes, voice annotations of a picture, or search queries to be executed on a remote search engine. While these numerous applications all utilize audio input, each provides a different interface and requires different user inputs to initiate the capture of audio input. The captured audio input is then processed by the application triggering the audio capture and is utilized only for the purposes of that application